UK primary school teachers youngest in OECD

[JIM CURRAN]

UK primary school teachers youngest in OECD

Britain's primary school teachers are by far the youngest among developed countries, and its teachers across all levels are younger than their European counterparts, the OECD's annual survey of international education has found.

About 60% of UK primary school teachers are 40 or younger, and 31% are 30 or younger. Across OECD member nations an average of 13% of primary school teachers are under 30.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/201 ... ngest-oecd

[elsiep]

I'd love to know how many trained teachers in the UK have left teaching.

elsie

[JAC]

50 percent leave within 5 years according to this blog. He also gives his reference for the fact.

http://pragmaticreform.wordpress.com/20 ... /system-2/

[JIM CURRAN]

Thanks Jac this is a very interesting blog and I agree with much of what it says.

“Nothing matters more to educational improvement than the quality of teaching.’’

However this is one statement that I don’t agree with and I don’t think the research supports it either. Teacher quality in the education system is important and schools have to be better able to remove incompetent teachers but this is only a very small part of a much bigger equation and to pretend that the quality of teacher makes or breaks an education system is to employ a simplistic and reductionist argument.

Here’s what Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has to say. It’s worth the read.

http://theeducatedsociety.com/richard-r ... r-schools/

[geraldinecarter]

I looked at this very quickly but it's a serious and interesting article and deserves time - thanks, Jim. There are a number of salient points but this is the one that leapt out from the page - President Obama: 'it’s also instilling a thirst for knowledge.....'

A good school library and encouragement to use the library helps greatly .... The author, Neil Gaiman, talking on some book programme this week said his parents would leave him off at the library in the holidays when they went to work. He went through the children's books A-Z, then preceded to adult books where he realised that the A-Z ritual didn't work. His school's library also had been particularly well stocked - in early 20th century, 1930s and 1950s...

[chew8]

Re. http://pragmaticreform.wordpress.com/20 ... system-2/:

Year on year, pupils’ lack of basic skills is not flagged up, and they continue to proceed through school without knowing the basics of times tables or reading, inhibiting their progress. If you can’t multiply or read, you can’t learn much else.

In Europe, kids who fall far behind, repeat the year.

It was certainly the case, when I was teaching students aged 16-plus, that too many had not had their lack of basic skills properly flagged up lower down the system. A few would always arrive at the college reading and spelling at or below 10-year-old level. In many cases, parents reported expressing concern way back at infant level and being told that it would all ‘come right’ when the child was ready – but it hadn’t.

Even the more able students made spelling errors that I wouldn’t have expected, and when I commented on this, they said that no previous teacher had corrected their errors. This fitted in with comments made at meetings with teachers from feeder-schools, which showed that there was a widespread view that spelling didn’t matter. I’ve been out of teaching for 13 years, however, and things may have changed a bit. The Year 1 phonics screening check should help to ensure that there is more emphasis on the most basic of basics in the first two years of school, but it will be another 5 years before the first products of that reach secondary school and another 4 years beyond that before they reach GCSE level. We can hope, though, that some difference may show in the Key Stage 1 results this year, as this assessment will now have been done for the first time with a national cohort of children who have done the screening check.

Before starting to teach students aged 16-plus in England, I had taught in South Africa, where the system, as in Europe, was that children repeated a year if they fell too far short of the expected level. In other words, there seemed to be a generally accepted idea of where children ought to be by the end of each year of school, right from the very first year, and they repeated the year if necessary. It didn’t seem to be necessary for many children, probably because of the very fact that teachers, parents and children all had a good idea of what needed to be mastered each year and what the consequences would be (repeating the year) if it was not mastered.

Jenny C.